July 2026 · Interim Note
A Rough Session, and Why I’m Not Touching Anything
Thursday was the first genuinely red session in a while, and it landed across almost everything I own. The S&P 500 fell 0.99%, the Nasdaq-100 fell 1.50%, and volatility (VXX) jumped 4.8% — the kind of day where the tape says “risk-off” before any single headline explains why.
Three headlines, one underlying worry
Netflix posted record Q2 revenue of $12.56 billion but guided Q3 growth to 11.7%, its weakest pace in three years, and the stock fell 7.3% on the close — not a name I hold lightly given how much of the “streaming is durable” thesis rides on guidance, not trailing results. Read the full writeup on the News page.
SanDisk, my largest position, fell 3.99% after a trailing-twelve-month run of roughly 3,000%; a pullback that size after a move that size isn’t a thesis break, it’s arithmetic. And SpaceX dropped roughly 5.4% as its post-IPO lockup expiration approaches — a real, dated, mechanical supply-of-shares event, not a change in the underlying business.
Underneath all three sits the same broader worry that hit the tape today: TSMC raised its 2026 capex guidance to $64 billion, and IBM had its worst day since 1987 after admitting customers are shifting software budgets toward hardware. Read together, the market spent Thursday asking whether AI infrastructure spending is still self-funding or starting to strain — precisely the question my July whitepaper tried to get ahead of. I go further into what I think this specific day actually means in today’s Opinion piece.
No trades today
The Blackout Rule and Holding Period exist for exactly this kind of session — one bad day is data, not a decision. Nothing in Thursday’s move changes a single thesis I’ve written up; it just moved the price I’d be buying or selling at.